Metro Pulse/Movie Guru/Sexy Beast

Movie Guru Rating:
Enlightening (4 out of 5)

Comment
on this review

Sexy Beast is more than a slick gangster drama

by Lee Gardner

Gary "Gal" Dove is an ex-gangster, with the emphasis on the "ex." Sexy Beast's opening sequence finds Gal (a beefy and blond-streaked Ray Winstone) poolside at his very own Spanish villa, clad only in a yellow fruit-smuggler bathing suit, baking away years of stress and British damp in the hot sun. An internal monologue, delivered in a thick, working-class English accent, offers a stream-of-consciousness narration of total indolence. Translation: Life is good. He loves his wife, Deedee (Amanda Redman) and it appears they sun and shop and play every day and dine with old pals Aitch (Cavan Kendall) and his wife, Jackie (Julianne White), every night.

But there are dark clouds gathering over Gal's sun-bleached paradise. An incident it would be a shame to reveal here puts his pool out of commission for a few days. And word arrives that an old colleague from London, Don Logan (Ben Kingsley), wants Gal to come out of retirement for one more job. You can tell from the tense and terrified looks on every deeply tanned face that Don is a hard man to turn down. Factor in a bravura job by first-time feature director Jonathan Glazer, an artful script by Louis Mellis and David Schino, a brace of fantastic performances, and a malevolent rabbit man, and you have one surprising, funny, and oddly touching film, not to mention one of the year's best so far.

Sexy Beast very well wouldn't work without open-faced ex-boxer Winstone, best-known in this country for playing monstrous fathers in bleak Brit films such as The War Zone and Nil By Mouth. Here he's a patriarch-as-pussycat, radiating sweetness and charisma like a sunburn and loved by all, right down to his Spanish pool boy Enrique (Alvaro Monje). Gal's likability only heightens the tension when Don shows up.

Sporting a Mephistophelean goatee and a pool-cue-straight posture that makes him look like he's been perching on prison bunks half his life, waiting to do something terrible, Kingsley is a revelation. His Don is a vicious terrier of a man unburdened by social graces and all evident emotions other than anger and spite. Determined to get his way, he cajoles, bullies, and threatens Gal, dripping poison on every relationship he holds dear almost as an afterthought. Before long the film reveals that there's more to Don's Spanish sojourn than first appears, a subtext Kingsley plays to absolute perfection.

In fact, Glazer takes sizeable risks with Don. The director made his name in flashy commercials and music videos, and Sexy Beast sports plenty of the post-Trainspotting stylistic razzle-dazzle endemic to certain young British directors. It's all here—a cheeky energy, a beat-fueled soundtrack, a highly mobile camera and unusual angles, and the occasional surreal touch (like a malevolent rabbit man). But after establishing a nervy rhythm in the opening minutes, Glazer stalls the film's momentum as Gal and Don embark on a protracted mano-a-mano duel of words and wills that plays like Mamet and Pinter in a high-noon shoot-out. Glazer goes so far as to tip the film toward Don's point of view for a few audacious scenes.

It soon becomes clear, though, that the director's after bigger game with such feints. He handles the Gal and Don cold war with aplomb, zipping through pages of what could have been static dialogue and exposition with skillful staging and a neat bit of cross-cutting. And it turns out that the camera follows Don because it must in order to set up the chain of events that give the last third of the film its tension, twists, and considerable emotional payoff.

In spite of Glazer's show-off moments, Sexy Beast is not just another glib crime film. One of most pleasant and unexpected surprises here is the love story between Gal and Deedee that the director quietly crafts in his spare time. (Redman is just one of several perfectly cast little-known British thespians who are marvelous in the smaller roles.) And when the big heist is finally set in motion, it's almost an anti-climax. All the suspense is centered squarely on Gal's sun-kissed moon face and how he's going to handle another sinister London gangster (Ian McShane) so that he can get back to his wife and his pool and his hard-won life of doing nothing. In The Sopranos' Tony Soprano, American audiences have learned to embrace a lovable bear of a gangster despite the fact that he lives immersed in crime and violence. It will be interesting to see what happens when they get a load of a lovable bear of a gangster who wants nothing more than to get out and stay out.